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Research and Development in Higher
Education:
[Re] Valuing Higher Education
Volume
41
Refereed papers from
the
41st HERDSA Annual International
Conference
2-5 July 2018
Convention Centre, Adelaide, Australia
Dados, N., Junor, A. & Yasukawa, K. (2018). Scholarly Teaching: The Changing Composition of Work
and Identity in Higher Education. In D. Wache and D. Houston (Eds.), Research and Development
in Higher Education: (Re)Valuing Higher Education, 41 (pp 49 - 59). Adelaide, Australia, 2-5 July
2018.
Published 2018 by the
Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia, Inc
PO Box 6106, Hammondville, NSW 2214, Australia
www.herdsa.org.au
ISSN 1441 001X
ISBN 978-0-908557-96-7
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requirements. Two reviewers were appointed on the basis of their independence and they reviewed
the full paper devoid of the authors’ names and institutions in order to ensure objectivity and anonymity.
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audience, soundness of the research methods and critical analysis, originality and contribution to
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full paper was presented at the international conference.
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49
Scholarly Teaching: The Changing
Composition of Work and Identity in Higher
Education
Nour Dados
University of Technology, Sydney
Nour.Dados@uts.edu.au
Anne Junor
University of Technology, Sydney
Anne.Junor@uts.edu.au
University of New South Wales
a.junor@unsw.edu.au
Keiko Yasukawa
University of Technology, Sydney
Keiko.Yasukawa@uts.edu.au
Abstract
By February 2018, almost 700 positions for a new type of academic, the ‘Scholarly
Teaching Fellow’ (STF), had been created (NTEU 2018). The creation of STFs
reflects a shift in priorities, both for universities and for staff as represented through
the sector’s lead trade union, the NTEU. There is growing pressure from
universities to promote teaching-intensive academic careers, mainly to strengthen
teaching capacity in the context of rising enrolments. There is also new recognition
from the NTEU that continuing teaching-intensive positions can offer a means of
reducing academic casualization. The resulting convergence in priorities has led
to the creation of this new category of employment in the academic workforce.
Drawing from in-depth interviews conducted for an Office of Learning and Teaching
Project about STFs, this paper reflects on the implementation and experience of
these positions from the perspective of academics and managers. A collective
narrative analysis of the purpose of the positions and the varied experience of
academics in the roles will be used to draw out the impact of these changes on
workloads, job security, professional identity and personal life.
Keywords: scholarly teaching, role specialisation, academic identity
Introduction
‘Scholarly Teaching Fellows’ (STFs), introduced in the Enterprise Bargaining round in the
Australian higher education sector in 2012, were envisioned as a pathway for early career
academics stuck in the casual treadmill. By undertaking teaching previously done by
casuals, STFs would absorb previous casual employment into permanent continuing roles
with a pathway for conversion into integrated teaching-and-research roles. Through
creating greater job security and career paths for teaching-only academics, the new STF
positions could enhance learning and teaching across the university sector and improve
the student experience. In practice, implementation variations across institutions and
50
disciplines (Broadbent et al., under review) mean that not all the positions created have
been continuing or full-time, and the pathway into an integrated role is often unclear, with
competing teaching-focused models emerging.
The primary aim of our research about STFs is to contribute to improved teaching and learning
in Australian universities through an evidence-based consensus amongst university
stakeholders concerning the development of STF positions. We present other work that is
primarily focused on teaching and learning quality, but here we raise the question of the
sustainability of the role as it is emerging, drawing on qualitative interviews, structured as a
collective narrative analysis. Key themes emerging across the interview dataset suggest that
the issues that have both driven and challenged the creation of the positions, are common
across institutional types and disciplines. While the provision of job security and the
professional academic status attendant on the new positions have generally been viewed
positively, career ambiguity and workload, with its impact on health and personal life, have
emerged as challenging unintended consequences.
Methodology and Data Analysis
This paper examines qualitative data that are part of a larger quantitative and qualitative
dataset for the Office of Learning and Teaching Strategic Project, ‘Scholarly Teaching Fellows
as a new category of employment in Australian universities.’ The interviews examined in this
paper were part of the campus-based research conducted at a selected group of universities
as part of this project. We undertook a confidentiality agreement with participants that the
names of participating universities and individuals would not be disclosed in our findings.
The institutions that participated in this research are broadly representative of university
categories in the Marginson and Considine (2000) typology, as shown in Table 1.
We conducted 80 in-depth interviews with various stakeholders involved in the development
of the STFs or alternative education-focused roles (EFR). For the purpose of data analysis,
interview participants were divided into two major categories – managers and academics, and
these were sub-divided into further categories. Four interview participants worked primarily in
a teaching and learning support role.
Of a total 34 managerial interviews, we spoke with 6 senior executives and 22 faculty
managers including deans, as well human resource managers and senior staff including heads
of schools. Table 1 indicates the distribution of management interviews by type of university
and managerial category: 18 were female, 16 male.
Table 1: Distribution of management interviews by university type and
managerial category
Type of University
Managerial Category
Number of Interviews
Sandstone & Redbricks (2)
Senior Executive
2
Faculty Manager
5
Human Resources & Senior Staff
3
Gumtrees (1)
Senior Executive
0
Faculty Manager
5
Human Resources & Senior Staff
0
Unitechs (1)
Senior Executive
1
Faculty Manager
6
Human Resources & Senior Staff
0
New Universities (2)
Senior Executive
3
Faculty Manager
6
Human Resources & Senior Staff
3
51
We conducted a total of 46 interviews with academic staff including casuals. Here, we focus
on the interviews conducted with academics in STF or similar education-focused roles. Table
2 indicates there were a total of 43 interviews in this category: 26 female and 17 male. Of the
26 females, 15 had done academic work for between 5 to 10 years and a fifth (6 interviewees)
had been in academic employment for more than 20 years. Among the male participants, the
distribution of academic work experience was less concentrated: 3 had been in academic work
for less than one year, and 5 had worked in universities for more than 20 years. Around one
third of participants had come from an industry or professional practice background, and
around 80% held a PhD at the time of the appointment. Most were in continuing full-time
employment, but some were in either fixed-term (usually 2 to 3 year contracts) or fractional
employment (between 0.5 and 0.8 of a full-time load). A small number were both fixed-term
and fractional.
Table 2: Sample analysis of STF and EFR interviews
Gender
History in
Academia
–
No. of
Years
Previous
Professional
Experience
PhD at
Appointment
Tenure
Employment
Fixed-
term
Continuing
Fractional
Full-
time
Female
<1 yr
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1-5
4
0
4
0
4
0
4
5-10
15
4
12
1
14
1
14
10-20
1
1
0
1
0
1
0
>20
6
2
6
1
5
0
6
Subtotals
- FEMALE
26
7
22
3
23
2
24
Male
<1 yr
3
3
1
1
2
2
1
1-5
2
0
1
1
1
1
1
5-10
4
0
4
0
4
0
4
10-20
3
2
2
1
2
1
2
>20
5
1
4
0
5
1
4
Subtotals
- MALE
17
6
12
3
14
5
12
TOTALS
43
13
34
6
37
7
36
Semi-structured interviews with these participants were conducted either face-to-face or over
the phone, and varied in length from 30 minutes to 1.5 hours. Both the manager and STF
groups were asked for perceptions of the nature of the STF/education-focused positions at
their university, the costs and benefits of their introduction, and how they saw the role as
evolving. Managers were asked about the connection between teaching, research and
scholarship, and STF staff were asked about the details of their contract and working lives.
Analysis
We present selected initial findings from the interview data, grouped thematically by
stakeholder category, focusing narrowly on the emerging nature of the role and its
sustainability. By organising the data thematically across the major stakeholder groups,
we attempt to identify the ‘collective narratives’ transcending institutional categories
(Bousanquet et.al. 2017).
52
Perspectives 1: University Managers
While the introduction of STFs and similar roles has been sector-wide, views about the reason
for their introduction varied among administrators at all levels of management. Recognising
and rewarding good teaching was among the main reasons offered by university managers,
but this was often accompanied by a statement about the need for greater specialisation of
teaching and research roles. Discussion of such specialisation has been current amongst
senior university managers for some years (see Probert 2013), and contested by the National
Tertiary Education Union (O’Brien, 2015: 278-285). Where role specialisation was not being
pursued as a policy at a particular institution, managers were more likely to prefer the retention
of integrated teaching-and-research positions. At least one Redbrick University has introduced,
independently of the STF initiative, and amongst its existing staff, a three-track career system,
‘education-focused’, ‘research-focused’ and blended.
Recognising Good Teachers
The desire to recognise and reward good teachers through role specialisation was not limited
to any particular type of university, but was evident at institutions that had embarked on
restructuring employment categories and the distribution of academic work. Recognising good
teachers and giving them the opportunity to develop teaching capacity was seen as also
beneficial for the student experience:
One of the initiatives [of a new university strategy] was to introduce specialisation
- academic specialisation across the University… and one of the ways to specialise
for an academic is to be education-focused. The aim was to allow academic staff
to specialise into areas that they excelled in, to improve the experience for
students. (Senior Executive 1, Sandstones & Redbricks)
Another manager at the same institution expressed this in similar terms, adding that academics
should:
not be pressured into trying to perform in an area where their strengths didn't lie,
which is just as true of researchers who aren't great teachers as it is of great
teachers who aren't great researchers. (Senior Executive 2, Sandstones &
Redbricks)
At another university where career paths had been created hand-in-hand with role
specialisation, recognizing good teachers and adjusting their workload mix accordingly were
key:
By creating the education roles and rewarding them exactly equally it is a message
to everybody this is really important to the university and there's a career path for
those people that have that expertise in that area. That's what it's about, that's the
rewards and recognition. So we won't expect you to have the same traditional
research outcomes. (Senior Executive 3, New University).
Deans also agreed that the STF initiative was a good way of recognizing and rewarding
teaching excellence, underscoring the formal and informal ways in which research takes
precedence in the university system. Other members of management saw the STFs as the
kind of change that was needed in universities:
But if we look at how important teaching and innovative teaching is to each of our
universities and that that is a big selling point to students - which, let's face it,
53
subsidize the research - then I think that we really have to seriously look at what
we're going to do about teaching and learning now. (Faculty Manager 1, Unitech).
Senior managers with a preference for the retention and expansion of integrated roles
recognized the value of STF roles for ‘getting really good teachers in front of students’ (Senior
Executive 4, Unitech). However, they voiced concerns that the structure and workload of STF
roles would make career progression difficult for academics aspiring to an integrated research-
and-teaching role:
…if that's what they want to do then that is fantastic, because there are a lot of
people … [w]ho want to be a good teacher, they really want to engage with
students and they enjoy doing that. If that's all they want, then being a scholarly
teaching fellow is good. However, if they're thinking it's a stepping stone to a full
academic role, I just can't see it. (Senior Manager 4, Unitech).
These observations echo the findings of recent research into the challenges of building an
academic career from a teaching-focused pathway (Bennett et.al. 2017). Other managers
found that the STF role did not properly recognize good teaching, but rather helped to continue
the privileging of research by increasing the workload of predominantly teaching-focused staff
like the STFs, and creating a false dichotomy between teaching and research. The new role
also increased pressure on academics aspiring to an integrated role to push themselves to
meet research expectations:
I just think it's created a subclass. That's where it's been described to me by the
faculties as a dead-end job. My understanding from the faculties and just talking to
them is that this guy here who's fantastic at teaching and does great research is
going to kill himself to try and get out of there and back up into normal. (Senior
Manager 5, New University).
Elsewhere, managers did not believe that role specialization could improve a university’s
international ranking or the student experience and wanted greater integration of academic
positions with fewer pathways:
I think if Australian academics or academia and universities are going to compete
at the international level … what needs to happen is we don't need to have more
pathways to become an academic, we need to actually shrink it. … there should
only be certain levels, like assistant professor, associate professor, professor. So
we should actually make it not all these different layers. … we then need to also
have … really aspirational targets set …, in both education and research. (Faculty
Manager 2, Sandstones & Redbricks)
Reducing Casualisation and Making Career Paths
Faculty Managers were often closely involved in the recruitment and implementation process.
While they generally agreed about the need to reduce casualization, the employment of STFs
was not seen as having had a great impact on this.
Asked about whether the overall level of casualization had decreased since the employment
of STFs, one faculty manager (Faculty Manager 4, Sandstones & Redbricks) felt that the
casual appointments were ‘filling a particular need’ and that efforts to combine the work of
various casual appointments into an STF role had not reduced the need for casual
appointments elsewhere. Some of the reasons were practical, relating to a large number of
tutorials for the same subject running concurrently:
54
… if you're simply doing a head count then probably not that much. … you often
need those multiple people simultaneously to engage in certain roles. So overall,
as a strategy, I don't think that if you measure the total impact, [it] would be
particularly large. (Faculty Manager 3, New University).
In other disciplinary areas with a high degree of casualization and reliance on industry
practitioners, the support for teaching from the STFs was welcome, but it was not seen as
economically feasible to convert all casuals to STFs:
… we do a lot of small group teaching, which is of course very difficult …. So the
way that we make that work is by using casual staff. So the Scholarly Teaching
Fellows are useful for us because … they're teaching intensive.
… In some of my programs it's 75 per cent [casual], so there's no idea that those
are somehow going to be converted into different sorts of roles, because it just
doesn't work financially. (Faculty Manager 4, Unitech).
In this faculty, the STF positions were seen as providing an ideal career path for experienced
professionals wanting to move into teaching without the pressure of research expectations,
though not a good fit for ‘young aspiring academics who are interested in conversion to
balanced academic positions’ (Faculty Manager 4, Unitech).
The initiative was seen to have reduced casualization only by reducing casual employment:
[the STF initiative] is not a way to address casualization. It addresses casualization
but in the sense that the introduction was accompanied by a reduction in managers’
casual budgets (Faculty Manager 5, Gumtree).
The workload mix for STFs, with as much as 80% of their allocation given to teaching and
between 0-20% for research and scholarship, was perceived by faculty managers as a real
obstacle for those wanting to move into combined teaching-and-research roles.
… in practice what has been happening is that most of the people, … that have
been promoted are ones who in fact, because they might have been part of a more
extended research group, were actually working enormous hours to maintain their
research outputs. In one case, we had someone who only had a 0.5 teaching
scholar position and the rest of their time they were working in collaboration with
researchers at another university. …, they were frustrated at being stuck in the
teaching scholar position with most of their time focused on teaching and …
motivated to try to break out of that and back into a standard teaching and research
position. (Faculty Manager 6, New University).
There was recognition among many deans that the initiative had worthy job security attributes,
with one noting the importance of the conversion mechanism for casuals:
[the conversion mechanism]... was the rationale from the beginning... So we felt as
a university and as a business school that we would do our bit to contribute to the
prospects of those casual lecturers (Faculty Manager 7, Unitech).
Still, there was concern that a full teaching-focused career path had not been created and that
STFs would still be judged on the same criteria as their balanced teaching and research
colleagues despite the differences in workload:
…in reality people are still often judged on the normal balanced workload kind of
expectations (Faculty Manager 8, Gumtree)
55
STF Positions as a Union Strategy
Some managers saw the STFs as part of a broader industrial campaign to reduce casualization
and improve job security.
It’s not just the NTEU, it's a whole ACTU thing about casualization of the workforce.
So over time the union have been saying, well how do we reduce casualization
and increase more secure employment. Originally they took the approach that it
needed to be a full career. …Then they went to the [scholarly teaching fellows]
obviously thinking, well if it's about converting some of the work to non-casual
employment then that's good. I think what we're seeing now is another iteration of
that …, which is about actually your casuals and job security for them at your
institution. (Human Resources Manager, New University).
Other were in disagreement with the strategy and found that their responsibility to implement
the STFs as per the industrial agreement sat uneasily with their preference for integrated
positions:
…we would not have created or appointed these STFs unless there was a
requirement. …, we would have created … normal 40:40:20 positions which would
be at lecturer level or associate lecturer level. These people are predominantly
teaching fellows, not 40:40:20. (Faculty Manager 2, Sandstones & Redbricks).
He added:
I think the university didn't realise what they were getting themselves into. . … By
the time people realised, the horse had bolted. …. If I can be really frank, the unions
really hoodwinked the university. (Faculty Manager 2, Sandstones & Redbricks).
Perspectives 2 – Scholarly Teaching Fellows and other Education-Focused roles
For STFs, the attainment of job security after years of casual work, and the attendant
recognition of academic professional identity within a school or faculty, were among the most
positive features of the role. Workload, and its impact on health and personal life, were among
the biggest challenges for those employed in STF and similar roles.
Job Security and Recognition of Academic Professional Identity
A majority of respondents felt that their employment in a STF role had provided them with job
security that they had not had in casual and contract work and this was a big incentive for
accepting the role, despite the workload and the variation in employment conditions across the
STF model. One STF noted an improvement on casual or contract work, where ‘you can’t come
and do any follow on or feel like you’ve grown in a particular subject even, because they keep
changing you’ (STF, Gumtree).
Most STFs endorsed the union effort to ‘push back against the casualization of labour’ (STF,
Sandstones & Redbricks). The STF role was welcomed as providing job security for early
career academics in a competitive market:
[the STF position] provide[s] what is closer to a genuine entry level position for
someone who is a new graduate … otherwise people are trying to have to scrape
together that experience themselves in casual contracts’ (STF, Sandstones &
Redbricks).
56
… I feel very, very lucky to have a permanent position in this environment,
especially as somebody who doesn't have a great publication record. Anything
that bugs me or irritates me or anything like that I always come back to that point
of how competitive the job market is and how lucky I am (STF, New University).
The recognition of professional identity that STFs experienced was also acknowledged as
better than for casual workers. One STF who had been a casual said ‘I don’t think people even
realise that I’m an STF anymore, like it’s just kind of I’m just one of the team’ (STF, Gumtree).
Another said she felt fully integrated and respected in her work area: ‘Oh look I am very much
a staff member as is any other tenured person in the building.’ (EFR, Gumtree).
Academics who did not have and did not wish to pursue doctorates felt the STFs made them
more competitive and welcomed the new job security and career path for teaching-focused
academics:
… I think for a lot of people who either don't have a doctorate or don't want one,
we really do need positions that recognise teaching experience and people who
want to focus on teaching as opposed to research, and can give them some sort
of work and some security in that role. (STF, Gumtree)
Nevertheless, some STFs still felt “second-class”, because teaching-only academics were not
perceived as “real academics”. Responses about their professional identity varied by
discipline, university and among individual academics:
I think some academics treat the STFs as if they only just teach. … There's
definitely an attitude that if you're in an STF role that somehow there's something
wrong with you, that you're not really a good candidate for grant applications or
something like that. You do get that sense from both senior people and your peers
sometimes, yeah. There are other people in management who … don't see you
that way at all. (STF, Unitech)
The lack of a clear career path for teaching-focused academics was seen as part of a larger
status system privileging research:
I do believe the universities still have a staff class system and the preference
without doubt goes to researching academics (STF, Gumtree)
In clinical areas, long-standing casual clinical placement coordinators (with a high service
component) and teachers who had taken part in team-based research over many years but
lacked a PhD, did not feel competitive in applying for conversion to an integrated teaching-
and-research role. One STF said she was not sure, despite her involvement with “about a
dozen” team-based research projects, whether she would be offered semester-long research
study leave. (STF, Gumtree).
Workload and Impact on Personal Life
While the job security and professional identity associated with the STF role were generally
viewed positively, workload and its impact on personal life were a challenge for almost
everyone we interviewed. For STFs and education-focused staff, the workload allocation for
teaching was between 50% to 80%, depending on institution. Translated into contact hours
these percentages rarely meant less than 12, and could be as high as 20 hours a week.
Consequently, associated non-contact and marking loads could not be contained within a
standard 35 hour working week.
57
One STF explained why he was regularly working a 60 or 70 hour week:
Oh that's just simply the fact that I have to teach across so many areas. Even if I
am just given an extra two hours of a tutorial in another unit that comes with a huge
amount of work because it may be a unit that … I'm not up on. So I'll have to do
all of the readings for the tutorials ... It may sound like two contact hours but it
ends up being two contact hours plus about five hours of preparation. (STF,
Sandstones & Redbricks).
Another STF on a half-time allocation found herself working close to a full-week every week.
I wouldn't say that it's a full week every week, but I'm certainly working very close
to a full week. Or maybe even it is a full week, it's just not what a full week looks
like for full time workers who are also being exploited. (STF, Sandstones &
Redbricks).
One in an education-focused role wondered whether ‘a double teaching load’ (80% teaching
allocation as opposed to the traditional 40%) was ‘actually impossible’: ‘there's just the sheer
impossibility of being able to complete that amount of marking in that amount of time’
(Education-Focused Academic, Sandstones & Redbricks).
One STF felt in a better position to ‘push back’ against workload compared to the
‘overwhelming’ scenarios faced by casuals (STF, Gumtree). So far, her hours were
manageable because she received an allowance as a new staff member. However, she was
concerned for her future workload, noting the experience of a colleague who had been hired
in the same role two years prior: ‘I was given eight honours theses to mark and he had 12. We
get a two-week turnaround on these’ (Education Focused, Gumtree).
A concerning impact of the STF workload was that on the health of individuals in those roles.
Most STFs had to contend with a fast-paced delivery and marking schedule combined with
very large student numbers. ‘I mean most of my time is just frantically delivering to large
numbers’ (Teaching Scholar, New University). One STFreported:
So I would say that my health has deteriorated markedly in the last 18 months
since I've been working in this job…. So really in the end I had to say to the head
of school that I have a disability. Basically you have to do this because I physically
have to have a break from the relentless nature of it. I cannot mark 210 students…
So effectively I took the pay cut because they can't manage my workload allocation.
… All the STFs in our school - there are five of us … they can't manage their
workloads either. (STF, Unitech)
Academics in STF roles also spoke of detrimental impacts on their mental health of the
relentless nature of the work:
I'd never been that anxious and worried, to a point where it was physiologically -
something was happening where I was just kind of shutting down. (STF, Unitech)
It's really stressful… You're trying to be a mother or a wife or a friend. Then you
are also thinking my God, I've got 300 students Monday morning coming to my
lecture. Half of them want to speak to me about their essay. (STF, Sandstones &
Redbricks).
58
Discussion: Job Security, Recognition — but at the Cost of Careers and Work –
and at What Cost?
The objectives for the introduction of the STF and similar education-focused categories have
included recognition and enhancement of the academic identity of good teachers, including
through career pathways leading out of precarity. One impetus was certainly the industrial
relations one, reflected in enterprise agreements, of addressing high levels of university
casualization through ‘conversion’ mechanisms into positions offering both job security and
career progression. Early indications are that, while the STF and other education-focused roles
may provide enhanced status and income security, it is much less certain that they offer career
mobility without the imposition of health-threatening workloads. An underlying question was
the possibility of gaining the publication record required for progression into ‘balanced’
teaching/service/research academic roles, and of individual career pathways within them. A
manager in a practice-oriented discipline indicated that a STF career path would go from Level
A to B based on teaching quality, from Level B to C based on publications on the ‘scholarship’
of teaching and participation in discipline-focused research teams, and from C to D through
‘high performance’, leading discipline research and participation in both disciplinary and
scholarship publication (Faculty Manager 9, Gumtree). Elsewhere at the same university,
however, it was suggested that non-disciplinary publication was actively discouraged for its
impact on ERA profile, while:
… to get into [a high-ranked] journal takes time that a person on 75% teaching
does not have. So there is a clash of objectives between improving teaching and
gaining research-based prestige. (Faculty Manager 10, Gumtree).
Participants in STF or education-focused roles indicated that their combination of a recent
discipline research-based PhD and considerable teaching experience was not sufficient to
allow progression to a ‘balanced’ Level B position: ‘there’s no way that they’re entry level’ (STF,
Redbricks & Sandstones). To be competitive for progression beyond a Level B Step 2 position
at her Sandstone university, one STF noted that she would be required to achieve a 5-year
publication program that included a book published by a high-status university press. A STF
stated that while she and colleagues who had completed 2 year contracts had expected
automatic conversion, the process was being implemented by external advertisement whereby
‘they can only hire people as lecturers who will be able to increase the research output’ (STF,
New University). An existing Level B participant noted that her university was actively
discouraging discipline-based research by education-focused staff, seeking to ‘cut us free’
from inclusion in research metrics, lest the ERA be adversely affected (Education-Focused,
Sandstones & Redbricks). So there appears to be an emerging risk, not fully understood when
the STF category was mooted, that role specialisation may offer job security at the expense of
a ‘balanced’ career path: ‘it seemed to me like a trap for the Early Career Researchers (ECRs)
who are floating round doing casual work’ (STF, Sandstones & Redbricks).
Conclusion
In quantitative terms, the impact of the STF initiative has been small. As a mechanism for
‘converting’ precarious teaching positions into more secure roles, it has had marginal impact
on a casual teaching workforce estimated at 51,168 (This figure is an estimate based on data
from the Department of Education and Training and Workplace Gender Equality Agency for
2016). In qualitative terms, the sample we have analysed here provides qualitative indications
of the early impact of this small scale initiative as a model for the creation of secure jobs and
career pathways for academic casuals and the development of professional identity and a
career path. Issues related to workload and its impact on the personal life and health of STFs
present a serious challenge to the model that requires further reflection.
59
Acknowledgements
The paper is based on the project funded by the Commonwealth Department of Education and
Training Office of Learning and Teaching: SP16-5285 'Scholarly teaching fellows as a new
category of employment in Australian universities: impacts and prospects for teaching and
learning’. We acknowledge our project team members James Goodman, Kaye Broadbent,
Tony Brown, and Glenda Strachan whose intellectual contributions have informed this paper.
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